As you may be aware, After Effects CS5.5 included a very convenient automated stereoscopic rig to help us work smoothly with stereoscopic projects.

I thouroughly tested this new rig while writing my book about Stereo in AE (sorry guys, once again it’s in french) , combined with a revamped 3D Glasses effect to see how cool and hip it was. The journey was a lot of fun, as it’s quite simple to use this rig for most of my stereo needs. But when came the time for me to export my 2 views separately, I was stuck.

The 3D glasses effects allows you to display your stereo comp in stretched Side-by-Side, Up-Down, and a large amount of Anaglyph modes. This is sufficent for uploading projects on youtube, but for Post Production work in big facilities, it’s not sufficent. We have to export the full picture for both eyes.

That can be done quite easily by going into the original comp where the rig created both cameras for you, but, there is one case where this workaround falls apart: it’s when you use one of these 2 3D glasses parameters: converge and vertical align. If both are at different than 0, you can’t just render the left and right preview camera.

After a few hours of unsuccessfully workarounding inside AE, googling and surfing, I eventually contacted the AE Team. Amir Stone, the engineer behind the stereoscopic workflow inside AE replyed me with this very usefull workaround.

This is the direct quote of his mail:

Ok here is a wonky workaround. Its unintuitive, but it should do the trick.
Create a black solid.
Set the 3D glasses to difference mode.
Set the right view to the black solid (leave the left view) and render out the comp to get the left eye.
Set the left view to the black solid (leave the right view) and render out the comp to get right eye.

It’s not as unintuitive as it sounds and pretty straight forward. I’m confident that the effect will be updated in future versions, but that’s my wild guess.

I hope that it will help all my fellow Stereoscopic workers in AE.